He was up at 7:40. We sat together on the upstairs couch, then headed downstairs. I read part of Ben Braver and the Incredible Exploding Kid He asked, “What’s the name for a trillionth of a second?” He was thinking of picosecond. I then remembered the card I had put under his pillow. We went up and he found it. He liked the card, and was very excited by the 5 shekel coin. Back downstairs I made a chart of fractions of a second, down to quintillionths (attoseconds), and then he played Dragonbox Little Numbers.
We then played with the art supplies he had chosen last night. Actually, we never got around to using the watercolors, as he made up a game: “So Brother is just colouring a nice picture for their neighbor Mikaela, and while he holds it up to look at it a woodpecker pecks a hole right in it. “ It was the blue-footed, blu-beaked one from a week or two ago.
He did like the art pencils and we used those for a few minutes, with him writing big numbers, and working on getting his commas in the right places (he drew them more like 1s at first), then we went upstairs to continue the Brother game. Brother was learning to make a paper airplane (“trying to make an airplane in the late evening”) but it was crushed by the tiger cub. Brother also found a cheetah cub and it became best friends with the tiger cub. Brother had to go earn money to pay for the medical supplies he used on the cheetah to make it better, then also to pay for more origami supplies. We paused to read Creepy Pair of Underwear to the cheetah.
Then, when brother was going to work for a farmer, cleaning up animal enclosures, and needed to earn 30 shekels at 2 shekels an hour, August did the division in his head and told me it would be 15 hours, and explained his thinking on it.
We eventually went downstairs and did our Green Planet time. I mentioned something about the Tooth Fairy, and August said, “The tooth fairy, you know, isn’t real.” We found the flash cards in the Bob Books container and he read through them. There were three that he had difficulty with: then, bring, and little. He was doing more multiplication and division in his head today, which means he’s now working on 3rd grade stuff, at least in arithmetic.
Lunch was ready, so we ate that: schnitzel, broccoli, and frozen strawberries. We played a little Polytopia, then went back to the Brother game. This time, Brother earned a 5 shekel coin, then the tiger cub swallowed it. He had to give it an x-ray, then get the coin out of the poop. When he got a second coin, the cheetah got in on the action. Every time he would try to hide the coins or keep them away from the cubs it would happen again.
He read to me, reading Plums andWilly’s Wish. The first went in his stack. He wanted to go buy a snack with his shekels, so first he exchanged one of his 5 shekel coins and some ones for a 10 shekel coin. He played some Dragonbox Little Numbers, then when we got ready to go he put the coin in his back pocket of his shorts. He was a little afraid it would rip his pocket, since the material was soft.
We left t 2:40 and drove to school. As we were getting out of the car he told me that Lydia once got upset at a meeting when someone said the same idea that she had. He explained it as a kind of stealing from her.
We went to the cafeteria and he used his 10 shekel coin to get a chocolate muffin. It was 8 shekels and the cashier asked how much change August should get and August said “Two!” He ate the muffin, then, a few minutes after the bell, we got changed and headed to the pool.
The pool was nice and empty. A woman and her third grade daughter showed up. August heard the girl talking and she said she got to the wall “literally five seconds ago.” August asked, “Did she say literally?” We played in the pool for quite awhile, with him kicking around on the kickboard (he said he’d think about trying his floaties off soon) and pulling me around. then, over by the stairs, he made up a game when I tried to shoot the kickboard up on the land. I got different points for how successful I was, then more for going through the space in the railing, then even more for going over. I kept playing, with him raising how high I was supposed to get, until we got up to 11,474.
As we got out, he told me of the 8000 mirror maze he has in his lab. The mirrors are so hard to see you run into them, but he said they were cushioned. I used the phrase “Cushion the blow” and he asked what that means.
We headed home. August asked a math problem and I used the calculator on my phone. On the drive back he used it, doing math problems. We got home close to 5. Carly was making dinner: little cheese pastas and baked cauliflower. August had an idea for a game and set up the wooden chair frame for a game similar to the one we were doing at the pool, with different points for the different parts you got it through. Carly went out and played it with him while I got changed. When Carly questioned his decisions on the game, he said she had to restart with zero points. Carly said she should teach him about authoritarianism.
He came in and said he had the idea for another Brother game. We went upstairs and he needed something to throw. He found his bag of hair, and Brother was working on his overhand throwing, and the cubs were getting in the way. Then, the woodpecker (which had become friends with the cubs) got hurt when they got too rough. Brother took care of it, but a zookeeper from the zoo wanted the rare animal and stole it. Brother ended up stealing it back, and there were a few rounds of that.
We went downstairs to check on dinner. August wanted to check something on my calculator again, and I got him his phone. He hadn’t used the calculator on it before, and he ended up sitting on Carly’s lap for 15 or more minutes, typing in problem after problem in as she gave him word problem involving multiplication and addition and decimals. He also found the calendar and realized that June 16th is Father’s Day. So our countdown is to both summer and Father’s Day.
We had dinner: little cheese pastas and cauliflower. He wasn’t big on the pasta, but ate lots of cauliflower. We had the last of the pie and ice cream, and I figured out our travel options for our adventure to Haifa later this week. August wanted the same weather app that I have (Carrot Weather) on his phone, so I installed it and set it to be less sarcastic than on mine.
He did art on my iPad after I wrote out a bit math problem out for him using it. We then tried out the Prodigy Math app for the first time. It is a wizard adventure game that incorporates math, so perfect for him. It started throwing a lot of geometry at him, so words like ‘vertices’, ‘acute’, ‘obtuse’, ‘perimeter’ and ‘area’ were words of the day.
We went upstairs and did a quick bath. I had given him 5 free minutes of Polytopia since we had run out of time for him to earn two more coins and 30 minutes of iPad time (he’d had plenty anyway, although it was good time with us learning together). All went well until the end of the 5 minutes and he was getting upset. Carly took over, and he calmed down and brushed his teeth. He had planned to read to Carly before bed though, and decided not to. He asked her, “How many 2s are in a trillion?” I asked him, “What’s have a trillion?” He replied, “500 billion?” He then went and did it for hundred, thousand, million, nonillion etc.
I left them about 9:15.
He thought that fairies could only be girls, as the two examples he’s seen of the tooth fairy are on StoryBots (where he says she wears pink and has a pink wand) and somewhere else. Carly told him that the fairies take turns and the next one would be a boy. August and I talked later, and when he told me he had always seen girl tooth fairies, I agreed that the tooth fairy is usually a girl, but that there are all sorts of fairies.
Present from the tooth fairy:
Writing big numbers:
Antics on the bed:
Tasting a blade of grass:
The game he set up in the yard:
Doing math with Mama on his phone calculator:
